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Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#41

Post by erwincoumans »

CJefferson wrote: post #26

I've posted a huge amount of academic code (I've linked to a small number at the end). I think you should, but it won't help advance your career immediately. However, I still think it's better for science. What is useful is if you can produce code people can build on and do their own cool stuff with -- then they will cite you. However, getting something to a state where it is tested for all reasonable inputs, has som…

Thanks, agreed. Small note: it is not clear what Minion is doing, from just visiting the github repo. Perhaps add "C++ constraint solver" in the github description, but it is still unclear: it could be a rigid body constraint solver for games? Maybe add a link to a paper?

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#42

Post by _aavaa_ »

Icko wrote: post #11
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

Is your goal to help advance the science and our general knowledge? Publish the code. You don’t even need to clean it up. Just publish. Don’t worry about coding style nitpicks. Having the code and data available actually protects you from claims of fabrication or unseen errors in hidden parts of your research. On the other hand, if your goal is only to advance your own career and you want to inhibit others from opera…

Not sure if posting the paper only is even the best move. I personally never work with papers with no code published. Just not worth the effort to reproduce them, when I can use the second SOTA for nearly no performance penalty and much less effort. All the groundbreaking papers in deep learning in the last decade had code published. So if you're aiming for thousands of citations, you need code.

Can confirm.

I personally look at any paper without code with great suspicion. The reviewers certainly did not try to reproduce your results, and I have no guarantee that a paper without code has enough information for me to reproduce.

I always go for the papers with code provided.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#43

Post by spaniard89277 »

nicec2 wrote: post #22
analog31 wrote: post #18

Depends on the climate of the field you're in, and where you're at in your career. There are fields where entire research groups routinely harvest preliminary ideas from graduate student publications, and then finish them and rush to publication before the student realizes what's happened. I'd say, grad student owes nobody anything until they finish, because they're bearing the greatest risk of losing priority, and t…

I can attest to this. I myself am victim of this. My undergraduate thesis was plagiarized by two other papers. Code was 80% the same, they just added some trivial things. No citing of my work at all. Look at my other comment for more explanation - if you are working under less known advisor, or at less known university, there is a high chance that this will happen if your work is good.

Write to the journal they published in and call them out.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#44

Post by vitorsr »

nicec2 wrote: post #6

Two times I have published my research code - both times I have found many other papers/projects plagiarized my work without giving me any credit. This happens way more than you would think, especially if you are working under less known advisor, and at less known university. As the other comment said, if you care about "advancing the science", and won't mind stuff like the above happening, then go for it. In my expe…

> Two times I have published my research code - both times I have found many other papers/projects plagiarized my work without giving me any credit. This happens way more than you would think, especially if you are working under less known advisor, and at less known university.

This has been very much my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#45

Post by anon_123g987 »

dqpb wrote: post #37
anon_123g987 wrote: post #13

One argument against publishing code is that maybe there's an error (or more) in your code, which validates your possibly mistaken theory, and forcing an independent reimplementation by others would uncover this problem.

The fact that there may be an error is an argument in favor of publishing the code.

Publishing the code can increase the number of people tinkering with it, and possibly debugging it, it's true. But people just going with it, start using it without looking into the details, and blindly trusting the author (i.e. being lazy) sounds pretty realistic, too.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#47

Post by fxtentacle »

Publish it.

Put a huge note in the readme that this is research code and only licensed for non commercial use.

Put a note on your personal homepage that you're available to hire as a research consultant for $1000 per day.

Companies who like your research will put 1+1 together. A friend of mine got hired straight out of university at a very competitive salary with this approach.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#49

Post by erwincoumans »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #42
Icko wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if posting the paper only is even the best move. I personally never work with papers with no code published. Just not worth the effort to reproduce them, when I can use the second SOTA for nearly no performance penalty and much less effort. All the groundbreaking papers in deep learning in the last decade had code published. So if you're aiming for thousands of citations, you need code.

Can confirm. I personally look at any paper without code with great suspicion. The reviewers certainly did not try to reproduce your results, and I have no guarantee that a paper without code has enough information for me to reproduce. I always go for the papers with code provided.

Agreed, reproducibility helps a lot, and it is very easy to get details wrong when reimplementing. Having the source code is a bit plus.
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